1. See Kim, Seong-Hak, Michel de L'Hôpital: The Vision of a Reformist Chancellor during the French Religious Wars (Kirksville, Mo.: Sixteenth Century Journal Publications, 1997)Google Scholar.

2. For a study of the way these three instruments—(i) case-law decisions (binding precedents), (ii) juridical treatises (teaching, lobbying, and scholarship), and (iii) legislation (issued by kings)—worked to facilitate a project of legal reform, 1500s through the 1650s, which was heavily dependant, at the outset (1520s–1550s), on one of them—case law (arrêts, or court decisions pronounced), see Hanley, Sarah, “The Jurisprudence of the Arrêts: Marital Union, Civil Society, and State Formation in France, 1550–1650,” Law and History Review 21 (2003): 1–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which informs the discussion below.

3. On legal humanism in France, see Kelley, Donald R., The Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language, Law and History in the French Renaissance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970Google Scholar, especially chap. 5–8; on the institutional parallel, French institutions, and French constitutional precepts identified, see Hanley, Sarah, The Lit de Justice of the Kings of France: Constitutional Ideology in Legend, Ritual, and Discourse (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983; French ed. 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chap. 1–4, and table 1, tracing the creation of a new French constitutional assembly, the extraordinary Lit de Justice, to 1527.

4. All part of the “national legal theme” set forth in the early decades of the 1500s (in Hanley, “Jurisprudence,” 5–20); the ordinance of 1539 required that legal decisions (arrestz) and procedures in all courts must be rendered in French (13).

5. L'Hôpital never completed his projected study of Roman law, or any other scholarly work; his collected Oeuvres (ed. P. J. S. Dufey, 5 vols., Paris 1824–25) contain practical items related to politics (not jurisprudence): harangues, remonstrances, epistles, and a treatise on the “reformation of justice.”

6. The details that follow about this extraordinary early reform movement, the first stage from the 1520s through the 1550s (of special interest for this commentary), as well as other stages from the 1550s through the 1650s, have been fully tracked in Hanley, “Jurisprudence,” 1–40, with findings that have a direct impact on Kim's theses.

7. Jean de Coras, so well introduced by Natalie Zemon Davis, was a judge in the Parlement of Toulouse who heard the Martin Guerre-Arnaud du Tilh case on imposture and later wrote a commentary on it, Arrest memorable …, in 1561; see The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983). Coras, a law professor, taught at universities in Toulouse, Angers, Orleans, Valence, and Paris, and also at Padua and Ferrara in Italy, before becoming a judge.

8. For a working theory about the way authority is always negotiated (not issued top-down), see Bourdieu, Pierre, Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998; French ed. 1994)Google Scholar, chap. 3, “Rethinking the State,” where he adopts as an example of his theoretical stand (9), the negotiation of a “family-state compact,” which is shown in Hanley, Sarah, “Engendering the State: Family Formation and State Building in Early Modern France,” French Historical Studies 16 (1) (1989): 4–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar (French trans.: “Engendrer l'etat,” Politix: Revue des Sciences Sociales du Politique 32 (1995): 45–65).

9. The process is outlined in Hanley, “Jurisprudence” (an article dedicated to Bourdieu). The rare tract of Coras (in precarious condition) is Des Mariages clandestinement, et irreverement contracte par les enfans de famille, au deceu, ou contre le gre, vouloir, & consentement de leurs peres et meres … (Toulouse, 1557) (its contents explored by Hanley, “Jurisprudence,” 9–10). On the “French way” of using “precedents,” see Dawson, John P., The Oracles of the Law (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Law School, 1968)Google Scholar.

10. For the edict of 1557 (old style 1556, February) (art. 1–5), consult Isambert, Francois Andre et al. , Receuil generale des anciennes los francaises depuis l'an 410 jusqu'a la revolution de 1789 (Paris: Belin-Le-Prieur, 1821–33)Google Scholar, 13:469–71; there it speaks of deliberations that took a “long time” (art. 1) and of the “public integrity” involved and [public] utility” served by the new law (Hanley, “Jurisprudence,” 13). In fact, given several factors—the collections of notable arrêts that show parental consent was being required by French courts decades prior to the edict of 1557 (establishing case-law precedents eventually treated as precedents); the intense lobbying by jurists for the edict [of 1557], and the admission that deliberations were lengthy, render the old assertion (given long before these findings and aligned with the top-down theories of power criticized by Bourdieu, see note 9 above) untenable: that is, the claim that Henry II issued the Edict of 1557 because the pope delayed annulling the clandestine marriage of Francois de Montmorency, to whom the king wished to marry his illegitimate daughter, Diane de France, an opinion given many decades ago by Ourliac, Paul and de Malafosse, J., Histoire du droit prive (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968)Google Scholar, vol. 3, pt. 2, chap. 2, sec. 3, 204–5, then picked up by historians, including Traer, James F., Marriage and Family in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press), 33Google Scholar; Burguiere, Andre, “The Formation of the Couple,” Journal of Family History 12 (1987): 39–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar; even more recently repeated by Lanza, Janine M., From Wives to Widows in Early Modern Paris: Gender, Economy, and Law (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2007), 28–30Google Scholar.

11. Ibid., 14; at the Council of Trent, after bishops voted to deny the request of French delegates to require parental consent (already required by law in France), the anger of French jurists was palpable, none more so than that of Dumoulin, whose response, Conseil sur le faict du concile de Trente (Lyon, 1564), argued for refusing those new church rules.

12. For later applause for the Marital Law Compact as an integral part of “our French law” going back to the early 1550s, see Claude Le Prestre in 1645 (Hanley, “Jurisprudence,” 34–37). On the theory of “local knowledge,” consult Geertz, Clifford, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983)Google Scholar.

13. For just three examples among many: Lanza, From Wives to Widows, which assesses the edict of 1560 (on second marriages); Margolf, Diane, Religion and Royal Justice in Early Modern France: The Paris Chambre l'Edit, 1598–1665 (Kirksville, Mo.: Truman State University Press, 2003)Google Scholar, which recounts the French establishment of special courts staffed by Catholic and Protestant judges; and Kessler, Amalia D., A Revolution in Commerce: The Parisian Merchant Court and the Rise of Commercial Society in Eighteenth-Century France (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007)Google Scholar, which traces the rise of the special French Merchant Court (the jurisdiction consulaire) devised from the 1660s into the 1700s to handle commercial disputes (the only French court to survive the political Revolution of 1789).

14. Of interest here is Sarah Hanley, “The Pursuit of Legal Knowledge and the Genesis of Civil Society in Early Modern France,” highlighting the shift from “judicial secrecy” to “judicial publicity” begun in the early 1500s and completed by the 1630s as configured by the avocat Antoine Furetiere's Universal Dictionary (worked on from 1648 to the 1670s, finished in 1684), chap. 4, in Historians and Ideologies, ed. Anthony T. Grafton and J. H. M. Salmon (Rochester, Minn.: University of Rochester Press, 2001).